October 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
Inauguration Day
Wife calls me from her cell, says all the way to work whitetails lined the roadway, four and five deep in places, says they looked like passengers behind the line to board a train. I remind her that today’s the day the governor comes to town with his entourage and motorcade. I ask her if she saw the rabbits. Come to think of it, she says, it did look like the doe were wearing fuzzy slippers. And were there birds perched atop bucks’ antlers? Hundreds, maybe thousands, in the voice she gathers for amazement. She asks if they’ve all left their nests to greet the governor as he passes. I tell her each and every creature have been summoned for extinction. Did you not see the front end loaders, dump trucks in the background? Silly me, she says, you’re right, always with a new administration.
Acknowledgments
First Friday, and I am only visually deconstructing a mixed medium while sipping a snappy little chardonnay and blowing foam through my minced bologna when I trip over my own two feet and slice a piece of thigh on the slivers, squirt blood floor to ceiling on a new white wall and spectators gather while I text for an Uber to Urgent Care to get stitched up, then return to where everyone surrounds me like iron filings on a north magnetic pole, not out of concern for my accident but in awe of it although Pollock would deny the accident and I am gracious and even a bit proud yet properly acknowledge the on-call physician’s assistant, the glassblower, the grape stomper, the casing stuffer skyping from a range of locations and of course, my parents in assisted living for their feet in this.
Charles Springer
Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is published in over seventy journals including The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Windsor Review, Packingtown Review and Tar River Poetry, among others. His first collection of poems entitled Juice is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. He writes from Pennsylvania.
October 2019 | fiction
When you are fourteen, you and three friends spend two weeks hiking in Snowdonia.
One day you descend from the mountains and wander into the mining town of Ffestiniog. You enter a sweet shop and joke around with your pals as you wait in the queue at the counter. A huge slate miner buying a pound of Jelly Babies looks over his shoulder and gives you a funny look.
Outside, you are greeted by the miner and his seven massive friends. They form a semicircle around you and hem you in against an iron fence. No way out. Each miner looks like he could break all four of you in half with one arm. The ringleader—the one from the shop—says you were making fun of him for speaking Welsh. Very diplomatically, you say you were not making fun of him for speaking Welsh.
“Yes, you were,” he says.
Two of his friends unhook their belts. Heavy buckles clink on pavement. The miner is saying Welsh people don’t like being made fun of for being Welsh.
“Do we, Fellas?”
His mates agree. They start to shuffle forward.
Speech, you realize, is all that can save you. Strangely automatic, your mouth opens and emits a string of words.
“We ken wotzwot. We dunna mess wiv men az ard az rock. Any one a yo lot could smash uz inter bitz.”
The leader’s expression changes. A puzzled look appears on his face. His head moves slightly to the side. He holds up a hand to halt his mates.
“You be speakin with an accent, Boyo!” he says. “Where you be from then?”
All of you answer in chorus.
“Manchester!”
At the sound of the word, the miners take a step back, and—incredibly—smile.
“Manchester?” says the leader cautiously. “I don’t be supposin you be United fans by any chance?”
All of you say that yes you are United fans.
“Right!” the leader says with a swipe of his paw. “Everything’s all right then! We won’t be messin with no United fans—will we Fellas?”
His pals shake their heads. The two with the belts fasten them back around their waists. The leader has the last words.
“Just don’t be makin no fun a the Welsh!” he says as they let you pass.
You are all walking briskly towards the mountains when he calls after you.
“And Keep Wales Tidy!”
Mark Crimmins
Mark Crimmins’s fiction was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a 2019 Pushcart Prize, a 2015 Best of the Net Award, and a 2015 Silver Pen Authors Association Write Well Award. His short stories have been published in Confrontation, Prick of the Spindle, Eclectica, Cortland Review, Tampa Review, Columbia, Queen’s Quarterly, Apalachee Review, Pif Magazine, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. His flash fictions have been published in Eunoia Review, Flash Frontier, Portland Review, Gravel, Eastlit, Restless Magazine, Atticus Review, Apocrypha & Abstractions, Dogzplot, Spelk, Long Exposure, Chaleur, Pure Slush, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.
October 2019 | poetry
We pretend having our life,
even world’s life, always under control,
from past generations to present days.
Sometimes we feel close to that certainty,
and it is good that this should happen,
giving us some encouragement on the route.
We work with the mind and the heart,
science and desire, on outlining the future,
which we anticipate promising and happy.
Skirting around life’s corners, every so often,
we are faced with frightening facts,
perhaps echoes of ancient Greek tragedies,
poor of hope in the human renaissance.
Wars, revolutions, tyrannies and persecutions,
born on the drumming of soulless men,
have delayed landing in the promised land,
where milk and honey spur and light reigns,
preventing all evil once sown.
But we are already listening
the beating of the wings of the dove’s return,
like those of Noah, bringing in its beak
the green branch of the olive tree.
Edilson Afonso Ferreira
Edilson Afonso Ferreira, 75 years, is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than in Portuguese. Largely published in international journals in print and online, he began writing at age 67, after retirement as a bank employee. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2017, his first Poetry Collection, Lonely Sailor, One Hundred Poems, was launched in London, November 2018. He is always updating his works at www.edilsonmeloferreira.com.
October 2019 | poetry
my clock of you seems to have stopped
I imagine you‘ve moved the furniture. erased the place.
I’ve been reading rilke about loss. he speaks of meeting the pain.
finding a place for it. inside.
what does it mean that words take so long to generate?
nothing and nothing and
then up from the belly through the chest out the throat
on to the page.
mouth wet to the page.
maybe it’s me. moving the furniture.
Ditta Baron Hoeber
Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist and a poet. Her recent poetry publications have been in Windowcat, Contemporary American Voices, the American Journal of Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Construction Magazine, New American Writing and Per Contra along with a suite of her photographs. In 2018 she received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. Her photographs, drawings and book works have been exhibited nationally and have been acquired by several artist book and photography collections, including those at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, MOMA’s Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection, Oberlin College and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
October 2019 | poetry
this quaint little town
is seedy as fuck
behind the Jackson Park ball fields
where the women pill up
and drink Marshmallow Cokes
at the Saturday Afternoon
Little League Games
and the men get drunk
and smoke dirt weed in the dug out
at the softball games
on Saturday Night
and across the parking lots
of second tier chain restaurants
Oliveoutbacklobsterbee’s
where teenage hopefuls
dip dreams into bowls of alfredo
and those who’ve lost hope
dote on their husbands
who still wonder how a fuck
led to a family
so Jack Tanner
a prominent lawyer
uses his wife
to lure other women
married or not
to impress them
by getting them drunk
and hanging things off of his penis
and the judge Davey Richards
just takes drunk girls
from bar to car
and then swerves himself home
because who really cares
it’s a joke among
The Good Ole Boys
who sit laughing at round tables
of gin games and vodka drinks
in the stag lounge of
the country club
where women
are still not welcome
they make deals over pretzels
afraid of being anything else
and the two empty chairs
are from Walter and Frank
who need to be home with their kids
but wanted to stop by the Cozy
where the north end comes alive
and smells like ash trays and onion rings
and Bobby stabbed his cousin again
so no one can use the pool table
whatever you would use it for
as its two-dollar pints of PBR
and a buck for a shot of well whisky
until Phil gets back from an errand
with Bobby’s cousin’s wife
in the apartment next door
owned by the county treasurer
who watches behind a two way mirror
with his dick in his hand
as the bars close down
and Sunday brings the baptism of dawn
and church parking lots fill
with the faithful, the hungover, and the guilty
and baskets get passed
through toll-booth pews
of naively obedient servants
facing Pastor Best
who has lead them in prayer
and warned of the dangers
of Muslims and Homosexuals
but will get caught tonight
by his wife
writing letters to his old friend in Leeds
about the time they stuck it in each other’s ass
and called it male bonding
in the eyes of the Lord
Chad Kebrdle
Chad Kebrdle is an English Professor at Ancilla College and an MFA student at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He finds both frustration and pleasure from residing in the cornfields of Indiana, where he draws inspiration for his work.
